ELIZABETH LONG – Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life

I’m putting down any books I read all the way through for the research project, as that seems fair enough. This is a study of women’s reading groups in Houston, Texas, with both a historical overview and then a detailed analysis of the way the groups worked. Although it had the limitation of only being about women’s groups, there was some additional demographic information that was useful and could be generalised, and I pulled out quite a lot of useful information (both from Long’s own research and the authors she quoted) on what makes people choose a book for their group to read (it goes on price, availability and its place in an accepted canon) and what makes a good reading group book (a moral foundation and good characters), which will help to inform my own research.